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That Resume Stinks. But That Job Description’s Not Much Better.

November 29, 2018

According to a recent Harris Media poll, 73% of senior execs say that finding talent is a critical problem at their company—despite an overload of resumes.

We get it. Sometimes it feels like TA and hiring managers speak Swedish, while job seekers speak Swahili. You spend time on each job description, honing it so that it tightly defines requirements and enticements to attract the best possible candidates. Yet the resumes and cover letters you get in return seem like they come from another planet, forcing you to spend hours wading through irrelevance to uncover a few promising leads. What went wrong?

Let’s start with those resumes you’re receiving. They’re designed to show what each applicant has done, not where that person wants to go or how a laundry list of skills and achievements might indicate a career direction. Even worse, they aren’t structured in a way so they can easily compared with resumes from everyone else.

Your job descriptions don’t help. They encourage candidates to tell you what they think you want to hear. They lack meaningful insights into whether a person reading the job description is qualified. They fail to give prospective employees realistic insights into your company or their career path—and they can be biased.

But it’s not your fault that job descriptions don’t work, and it’s not the candidate’s fault that resumes are hard to use. The fact is they are designed for a different era. Resumes and job descriptions stink because they are state-of-the-art for a totally different time.

You wouldn’t take a horse-drawn carriage to work. How come you’re forced to use ancient technologies to hire?

Here’s the good news: artificial intelligence applied to talent acquisition can help you dig deeper, discovering the potential and possibilities for both you and your candidates hidden within resumes, job descriptions, and across the Internet. You get to focus quickly on those candidates whose skills best match your needs—both for open positions now, and for growth positions in the future.

Artificial intelligence done right turns recruitment and retention into competitive advantage. It takes what already works in your recruitment process and frees your team to work better, faster, and smarter. That’s better than yet another pile of resumes, any day of the week.